number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill

articles

IN a famous exchange between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald is reputed to have said, “The rich are different from the rest of us,” to which Hemingway replied, “Yes, I know, they have more money.” Liberals have long contended that Hemingway had it right. There is nothing wrong with the poor that a little more money wouldn’t cure. This view is, I believe, profoundly misguided. Money can alleviate the harsh conditions of poverty, but unless it is used to leverage changes in behavior, it will have little lasting effect.

DEBATES about the poor, it seems, will always be with us. The pendulum swings between the argument that poverty results from lack of opportunity and the view that it is the fault of the poor themselves. These disagreements are well illustrated in three recent books with three radically different interpretations of the same reality. I wish I could say that each of these books contains, in equal measure, a piece of the truth. But they vary not only in their diagnoses but also in the degree to which their evidence and arguments convince.

CONSERVATIVES have decided that what ails America is that not enough of us are getting and staying married. They have a point. Not only are fewer people marrying than in the past but, more disturbingly, one out of every three children is born outside of marriage. The life chances of these children are seriously compromised. Far more of them will grow up in poverty, fail in school, and enter adolescence with a propensity to repeat their parents’ youthful mistakes. Indeed, as Jonathan Rauch has argued, and the data suggest, marriage is displacing both earnings and race as a source of division in America. Children growing up in a one-parent family are four times as likely to be poor as those growing up in a two-parent family, and those growing up in a single-parent white family are three times more likely to be poor than those growing up in a two-parent black family.

ALMOST no one thinks it’s a good idea for unwed teenagers to become parents. It would be the odd parent, indeed, who counseled their own teenage son or daughter to start a family. Most parents hope that their children will finish school, find a job, and marry before they take on the burdens of parenthood. But what the majority of parents, almost regardless of race or social class, want for their own children is not what we have. Instead, 40 percent of all girls in the United States become pregnant before their twentieth birthday, and one out of every five goes on to become a teen mother. The overwhelming majority of these young mothers are unmarried and end up poor and on welfare.

AMERICA is known as “the land of opportunity,” But whether it deserves this reputation has received too little attention. Instead, we seem mesmerized by data on the distribution of incomes which show that incomes are less evenly distributed than they were 20 or 30 years ago. In 1973, the richest 5 percent of all families had 11 times as much income as the poorest one-fifth. By 1996, they had almost 20 times as much. But it is not only the distribution of income that should concern us. It is also the system that produces that distribution.